Glassific, our augmented reality video conferencing tool, has finally been deployed as a beta version, just on the last working day of 2011. The first application based on this system is a simple Paint-like utility that allows users to draw a picture in the air, record a video of the creation and upload it directly to YouTube. All this stuff, without even touching your computer!

How much bootstrapping is needed before being able to have a product capable of providing the cash flow needed to run the company? It seems that coming out for the chicken-and-egg recursion is quite tough. Developing the product takes time but bootstrapping also requires lots of resources that lower the priority for the product.

The obvious answer to the question above would be to use the time needed for the development of the product to maximize the impact of the tasks to be completed and tune these tasks so that the result is the sought-after minimum viable product. Read the rest of this post »

Something interesting is currently happening around the Silicon Roundabout in London. The UK government is planning to help the development of technology-related companies in the area between the Old Street roundabout and the Olympic Village as statistics show this is a sector in constant growth both in terms of market and especially in terms of employment. The initiative has been named “East London Tech City” and since we got the news, we began thinking about how it could affect us or even better, how it could prove to be useful for our plans.

We are working hard towards publishing our new service for web-conferencing with augmented reality (project name CalaBoard) and among the programming features of the framework we adopted, Spring, there is Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP).

In 2005 I had an idea for a mobile application that couldn’t be implemented for 3 reasons: mobile web connections were not popular enough yet, they were expensive at the time and the application in its core isn’t supposed to bring money.